Mr. Dell's

For the past several years, I’ve been trying as best I can to buy only packaged foods, supplementing the mostly fresh (and local) foods I try to use, that have no more than five ingredients, none of which are chemicals I can neither recognize nor pronounce. It hasn’t been easy. Recently, though, I discovered Mr. Dell’s Shredded Potatoes, packaged frozen hash browns with only one ingredient (though the package lists it as “Ingredients:”): “Potatoes.”

As I look through our pantry and refrigerator to find examples of packaged foods with more than five ingredients and/or swimming in indecipherable chemicals, I can’t find any. There are a few that may have as many as 10 or a few more ingredients, but they all seem reasonable and are actual food or herbs or spices. I suppose the reason for this is my selectivity in shopping over the past several years (I certainly still find cans and bags and boxes of processed foods at the store that read like something you might get at the pharmacy), but I’d like to think that my discovery of Mr. Dell’s Shredded Potatoes might be an indication that our food industries and groceries have been making progress in actually selling us real food. (Mr. Dell’s apparently was in the forefront, having its start back in 1969 in Kansas City, MO.)

It’s not often I get to be optimistic. But it feels good on the rare occasion when I am.